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Friday, December 2, 2016

Blogtour: The Rodeo Knight by Ashavan Doyon

Please welcome Ashavan Doyon with

The Rodeo Knight

Sam's Cafe Romances #3

Blurb:

Struck by amnesia after a car crash, Brian Stouten has been living a life laid out by his family, a heterosexual life that just doesn’t fit. When he learns it was all a lie, he returns to the small college town that’s his only clue to his past. But the town is still unfamiliar, and the man he’d hoped would make all his memories return is on a honeymoon with another man. To add insult to injury, everyone thinks Brian died in the crash. It’s only when an out-of-place cowboy asks to bum a smoke that Brian realizes this trip was meant to be.Sylvester Thomas has always fought a secret desire, and done it successfully. But when geeky Brian offers him a smoke and a light, a simple brush of hands has Sylvester’s hidden passions burning deep. Did he make a mistake letting Brian walk away?

It’s all about the superheroes!

Ashavan Doyon here at My Fiction Nook! I’m so happy to be here. I’m going to be talking a little bit about The Rodeo Knight, which came out on November 30. I’m excited to finally be able to tell Brian’s story!

I often have trouble with titles. Some authors write their books knowing the titles, and I’ve done that, sometimes (the current work in progress has a working title of Forgiving James). Titles can be easy or very difficult. For instance: Forgiving James was easy because it was part of a series where all the titles are two words where one of the words is the name of the main character.

The Sam’s Café Romances don’t have that convention. I decided on the title for The King’s Mate (book 1) after writing it. I had a list of about twenty-five possible titles, and I remember arguing with my beta reader about which one worked best. A Wounded Promise (book 2) was even harder because I couldn’t decide whether to maintain the chess theme in the title. I finally decided that it was more important for the title to represent the story.

So you said this was about superheroes… *foot tapping*

Yes, I did. See The Rodeo Knight title is about a superhero. I’m sorta psyched that it happened that way, since unlike the other two stories in the series, this one got its title first. That’s because it was pitched to the editors before I wrote it, so it had all sorts of things I normally write after the fact. A title. A blurb. Character names. A plot. I’m a total pantser when I write, so all of that was a bit out of the ordinary for me.

But in the story, Brian, our back from the dead chess grandmaster, was a comic fan and budding artist before his family put a stop to his frivolity (well, that’s how they saw it). The hero in his stories was, appropriately, related to his chess mastery… a cowboy who fought with laser beams and rode a knight chess piece. So the hero of Brian’s story was the rodeo knight—a role played in his romance by Sylvester, the displaced cowboy.

Sylvester is quite the comic book/super hero fan, and he’s here to give us his top five heroes. Sylvester?

Thanks! Well, these are hard choices because you never know whether to narrow it to DC or Marvel or to include things like Image, because you know some of those are just fantastic too. But my best 5 in no particular order:

The Lone Ranger. This is cheating, I know. He’s not really a superhero. But I could never much relate to Zorro, and this was a comic book hero I could relate to. He was all about making the world better with what you have. That’s a hero. The kind you could aspire to be like.

Spider Man. What teenager doesn’t love a hero that’s like them. Everything about Spider Man is just cool, from the fact that he’s a teenager with teenage problems to swinging around on webs. I just want to try it, just once. He’s a bit of a geek. I mentioned I liked the geekiness thing, right?

Captain America. Cliché? Maybe. This is about believing that your country, your flag, is something to aspire to. People may not always agree with Captain America, but they all agree that he has a code, he knows what right and wrong means and he’s not afraid to make a stand. I love that. And his weapon is a shield that ricochets and comes back to him. I tried that with a Frisbee and it never quite worked. Also, blond blue-eyed hotness.

Batman. The perfect dark hero. And aside from his gadgets he’s just a guy, surrounded by people with crazy superpowers. Also he gets all the good movies.

Iceman. When I was little I wanted a gay superhero so bad. This gay superhero. Then they did it, they made him gay. People said it was so wrong and I wanted to scream. Did they not understand? Those superheroes belong to us too. And Iceman being gay made perfect sense. Also, again, blond, hot. Sensing a trend.

That’s it from Sylvester, his top 5 picks for favorite superhero. My own top pick is Aquaman. Yes, there’s a picture somewhere of me in the underoos from when I was a kid. No I won’t show you that picture.

The Rodeo Knight releases on November 30, along with the second edition of book 1 The King’s Mate, and a print only anthology edition of the first three books of the Sam’s Café Romances — The Chess Master Chronicles. See you at the next stop (December 5, TWO locations: Scattered Thoughts and Rogue Words; Two Chicks Obsessed with Books and Eye Candy).

Get the book:

About the author:

For fifteen years, Ashavan Doyon worked with students in the student affairs office of a liberal arts college. He recently decided to shake things up a little, and is now working in the publications and communications office at the college. During lunch, evenings, and when he can escape the grasp of his husband on weekends, he writes, pounding out words day after day in hopes that his ancient typewriter-trained fingers won't break the glass on his tablet computer. Ashavan is an avid science fiction and fantasy fan and prefers to write while listening to music that fits the mood of his current story. He has no children, but lavishes attention on his sole remaining fur child, a very elderly pug. A Texan by birth, he currently lives in New England, and frequently complains of the weather.

Ashavan went to school at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, getting his degree in Russian and East European Studies, with a focus in language and literature. He has two incomplete manuscripts from college that he goes back compulsively to fiddle with every so often, but is still not happy with either of them. He still loves fantasy and science fiction and reads constantly in the moments between writing stories.